Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix was taken down on Wednesday with infinite precautions from its walls at the Louvre Museum for a restoration which should last until spring 2024, AFP noted on Wednesday. The topless woman, brandishing the blue-white-red flag on a barricade and among insurgents, in the heart of Paris, was painted by Delacroix (1798-1863) in 1830, the year of the fall of King Charles and the accession to the throne of Louis-Philippe I.
An allegorical work inspired by the Three Glorious Revolution in France, this large-format oil on canvas (3.25 m by 2.60 m) is usually exhibited in one of the large red rooms of the Louvre alongside The Taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders and The Death of Sardanapalus, Delacroix’s two greatest paintings. Restored for 10 months, The Death of Sardanapalus should return to its location on September 27, according to the Louvre museum.
“Long prepared in advance by x-rays and analyses” of the canvas, the restoration of Liberty Leading the People takes place “as part of a major restoration campaign launched in 2019 for the large formats of the 19th century”, specified to AFP the director of the paintings department of the Louvre, Sébastien Allard. To restore its shine to the painting, “the oxidized varnishes which have turned yellow which alter the blue-white-red chromatic range of Liberty must in particular be removed using solvents,” he said. The painting will be temporarily replaced by the painting which was located just opposite, Les Femmes souliotes by Ary Scheffer (1827).
Since 2015, more than 200 restorations, some of which are large-scale, have been carried out by the Louvre museum from La Belle Ferronnière by Leonardo da Vinci (2015) to La Mère infortunée by Constance Mayer-Lamartinière (2022). The Women of Algiers (2022) and Scenes from the Massacres of Scio (2020) by Eugène Delacroix, as well as The Venus of Pardo by Titian (2016) and The Inspiration of the Poet by Nicolas Poussin (2019) have also been restored.
